Unit Economics Shared Cost Scenario

Overview

Umbrella can allocate cost to any custom dimension - customers, tenants, products, features - even when that dimension isn't in your billing data. This walkthrough shows the full end-to-end pattern using customers as the example: bring in customer usage from an external source, build a Business Mapping that uses that usage as the allocation key, then view Cost per Customer in the Cost & Usage Explorer.

Why it matters

Customer names and most other business dimensions rarely appear on cloud bills. Tag-based allocation forces you to tag every resource, keep those tags in sync, and accept that shared resources (multi-tenant databases, load balancers, Kubernetes clusters) get split by proportions that don't reflect actual consumption. Unit Economics changes the input: you bring in the usage data you already have - throughput, requests, memory, transactions - and Umbrella distributes cost by real consumption.

How it works

Three stages, in order:

1. Inject customer usage data into Umbrella as a telemetry pipeline.
2. Map the cost you want to allocate, using a Telemetry-Based Business Mapping that references the pipeline.
3. View the allocated cost as a new group-by dimension in the Cost & Usage Explorer.

Each stage has its own detailed article; this page walks the pattern with a concrete example.

Step 1: Inject customer usage as a telemetry pipeline

Bring your customer usage data into Umbrella. The source can be anything you already collect - a data warehouse export, an application metrics database, a billing system - as long as each row ties a customer identifier to a usage measure with a timestamp and cloud account.

In the example, the pipeline Customer Stats carries:

• Dimensions: Date, Payer Account, and the customer identifier (e.g. Limors Customer), plus additional attributes.
• Measures: memory_utilization, throughput_mbps, and others.

Upload via CSV or API, then confirm the pipeline is Active on the Metric Pipelines page (Unit Economics → Metrics Pipelines).

See Telemetry Pipeline Onboarding for the full field-by-field setup, supported formats, and required mappings.

Step 2: Create a Telemetry-Based Business Mapping

Now define which cost to allocate and how to distribute it. Open Business Mapping, create a new mapping, and set Type = Telemetry-Based Group By.

Using the same example:

Name the mapping something recognizable - the mapping name becomes the group-by option in the Cost & Usage Explorer. In the example, the mapping is named Cost per Customer.

Umbrella distributes the filtered cost across customers by weighted average against the allocation metric. A customer accounting for 40% of the throughput on a given day receives 40% of that day's filtered cost.

See Business Mapping: Telemetry-Based Group By for the full setup, field descriptions, and rule construction.

Step 3: View cost per customer in the Cost & Usage Explorer

The Business Mapping is now available as a group-by dimension across the platform.

1. Open the Cost & Usage Explorer.
2. Click the Group By control at the top left.
3. Switch to the Business Mapping tab.
4. Select your mapping - in the example, Cost per Customer.
5. Set the date range and any additional filters, then click Apply.

The chart now shows the filtered cost broken out per customer over time, with each customer as a colored series. Costs that had no matching usage appear as Not Allocated if the toggle was on in the mapping.

From here you can:

• Drill down with Next Drill to break each customer's cost by service, region, or any other dimension.
• Switch cost type (Amortized, Net Amortized, Unblended) using the cost-type control.
• Save the view for reuse, or set it as your Main Dashboard.

Related

• Allocate costs based on telemetry and KPIs - which method to use when
• Business Mapping: Telemetry-Based Group By
• Telemetry Pipeline Onboarding
• Unit Economics